Fonds

Born March 24, 1912, in Lac-Sainte-Marie in the Outaouais region, Maurice Baribeau was the fourth child in a family of six brothers and sisters. His mother, Lucia Lacroix, was a homemaker and his father, Théodore Baribeau, was a shopkeeper who died before the beginning of the Second World War.

Maurice Baribeau began his career as a city councillor, and then started working for the Institut canadien-français d’Ottawa. In 1940, he entered the Elementary Flying Training School in St. Eugene, Ontario, where he garnered attention for his skills as a pilot. After passing his flying test, he became a Class 1 flight instructor in 1942, before joining the Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF).

He was then sent to the front as a Beaufighter fighter pilot. On September 14, 1944, during a military operation off the coast of Norway, Maurice Baribeau's plane was hit and caught fire. Forced to make an emergency landing, he managed to reach the shore, but his co-pilot did not survive the crash. After finding refuge with a Norwegian family, he was captured the next morning by the German army.

Maurice Baribeau lived as a prisoner of war for more than eight months. Imprisoned at Stalag Luft III, a camp in Sagan, Poland, until January 28, 1945, with no news of his family, he experienced hunger, cold, maltreatment, forced relocation and solitude. February 4, 1945, the prisoners began marching for an entire week in freezing weather to reach Stalag III-A, a camp run by the German army in Luckenwalde. Maurice Baribeau and thousands of other prisoners were finally liberated on April 22, 1945, when the Russian army took over the camp after three days of fighting led by the Allies.

Released into the care of the American army one month later, Maurice Baribeau stayed in a recovery camp before travelling from Germany to England, where he set sail for Halifax, Nova Scotia, on board the Île de France ocean liner. He was reunited his family upon his arrival in July 1945.

Settled in Gatineau, Maurice Baribeau married Yvonne Tessier on May 8, 1946, exactly one year after the end of the Second World War. The couple had three sons: Guy, Rolland and Richard. When Maurice Baribeau retired from the RCAF, he pursued a career as a regional manager with the Canadian Department of Transport. He died at the age of 93 on February 15, 2006, in St. Lambert.

This biographical information about Maurice Baribeau was gleaned from various sources: the family tree provided by his family, the description of his interview on "L’aviation au Québec : une aventure passionnante," a radio show broadcast on Radio-Canada, and all of the archival documents in this fonds.